I had a dispute with the husband of my mother, but that happened a half-year ago. However, since then we did avoid each other. And when I do avoid people, I am really serious about it, which means I really didn’t see him for a half-year. When I wanted to talk with my mother, I either did it via phone or we met each other without him as I demanded this. Of course this couldn’t go on forever, that’s at least what the whole family thought. Since the husband of my mother is as stubborn as I am, it probably could go on forever. So, my mother had the glorious idea to invite the whole family to the garden for “Kaffee und Kuchen” to bring him and me together again, and she failed to convince me in the past but grandma spoke with me too and told me that you sometimes have to forget and forgive.
Sometimes people do things differently, or they have different opinions and I thought maybe my mother and grandma are right and you just have to accept it. They are aware that if I have a problem with someone, it’ll take a very long time until I get over it. Yes, you could say I am very unforgiving, and some people would really have a problem to reach me again in case if something went wrong. But in this case it’s different, my grandma was right, it’s family, it’s the husband of my mother and if we don’t manage it to get along, it makes her sad. The problem was not even a big one, but stubborn people like me know what they want, and even smallest conflicts are something I am sick off. So, when there is even a tiny conflict, I usually cut the connection to avoid a stressful life.
But as said, the idea of my mother and my grandmother is that you sometimes have to accept that you don’t get along with someone in certain situations, and that it is sometimes better to concentrate on the times where you get very well along with the person. It can mean that you have to accept someones opinion or how the person is doing something differently. I think I would disagree if we would talk about a stranger, or someone outside of the family, but I started to agree in this case because in the family it is something different. It’s also about my mother, since he is the husband, and I don’t want her to be unhappy. I’ve been good with him most of the time, which means it shouldn’t be too difficult to avoid topics where we don’t get along.
I started to question if I have to be so stubborn in this case and accepted the invite and met her husband in the garden, together with the whole family. As it seemed, we both had the same strategy and didn’t want to talk about our dispute. We started with a handshake, and slowly we started to talk about usual things. Then he showed me the two newborn fledglings of his garden chickens. When he told me that he wants to build a mount for his boat because he is unhappy with the fact that the boat is a trip hazard on the ground, but that he can’t hold the wood straight while using the electric drill, I replied “Sure, you have everything here and want to start?”. We started and I helped him with the measurement, bubble level and by holding the wood straight while he did used the drill and screws.
We finished the mounting in no time, and now the boat has a place without being a trip hazard on the ground. Maybe my grandma was right, sometimes you don’t have to talk about the problems of the past, sometimes you have to forget. It was much easier to work on something together, it felt like there has never been a dispute…
Diary of Dennis 
I expect you feel better too now that the rift is healed, your mother will be happier and that will make you happy. It is difficult to have these situations with family members and if your step father is someone you have always got along with until this dispute occurred and it is not over something that really matters a lot it is better to forgive and forget. If the subject ever comes up again you can agree to disagree and move on although I suspect both of you will avoid it in future.
Yes I think I feel better now. When I say I have no issues to cut a connection, it’s probably pride, and the fact that I feel a bit too old to be stressed by any kind of disputes, and most of the time it works to just move on by cutting ties. But when pride leads me into a situations where I can’t visit my mother without asking if she is alone, also I got feelings like “Uh, this shouldn’t be the case”, especially when I noticed that it makes my mother unhappy.
But males are often stubborn, or act based on pride… then it’s good when you have female big chiefs like the mother or grandmother, who act by logic, who take it easy, who want an intact family and who make it happen 🙂 Yes, I got along with him most of the time and a slight variance was just exaggerated by stubbornness from both sides. We basically did make a mountain out of a molehill, we also have been stressed at that time which can lead to these situations. Since my uncle got his brain tumor diagnosis, we all have been more stressed than we would admit, because we wanted his well-being but sometimes forgot ourselves.
You’re right, that’s my lesson here. I don’t always have to cut ties, it might be smarter to bypass discussions where we don’t get along, I hope it’s his lesson too. Also another lesson is that I won’t discuss things when I feel stressed out on a certain day, or when I notice the other person is in a bad mood too because it’s a recipe to collide with each other.
The fact that we just wanted to work on this boat mounting thing in his garden, really shows that we don’t want to bring topics from the past back up. We just tried to get along and it worked. And I like the boat mounting thing we created 🙂